Family ties

My Mom is the second oldest of 7 children. Unfortunately my aunts and uncles are spread around the U.S. California, Florida, North and South Carolina and Maine. When I was a kid every few years we would all get together for a family reunion, usually in Myrtle Beach. We all would have such a good time! A week in the sun, visiting with family we hadn't seen in years. My cousins, siblings and I always seeming to get into some sort of trouble. Still to this day, we occassionally pull out the videos from then. When I was only 8 yrs old! Watching everyone when they were younger, laughing at the hairstyles....such a huge part of my past.

Our last family reunion was in Panama City, Florida. Almost 12 years ago. I think because all us kids were getting older and such, it was getting harder to get everyone together. At the time I was 18, and pregnant with Ryan although no one knew. My other cousins were around my age by a few years and one particular cousin, Jon, lives in California.

For Jen's wedding, she obviously invited all family members from all around, and although a few made it, she was hoping our cousin Jon would. He wasn't able to make it, but Jen did have me send him an email when she was on her way to CA to see if she could meet up with him. I really haven't talked to him since the family reunion. Its difficult to keep in touch with such distance between us, plus with him being a guy, there's not a whole lot we have in common. But in my email I suggested we keep in touch because family is very important to me and its better late than never.

I actually didn't think he'd email me back. I mean, maybe he'd rather not keep in touch. He finally did send me an email though. You know sometimes how people try to exaggerate their life to impress or whatever. Which is okay, I mean, I think we all do it at some point or another. So anyway, I had known that he had gone to college and had a girlfriend, but no kids. In his email he tells me where he works and gives me the figure that he recently bought his house for. Its so hard to tell through an email how a person is trying to come across. He could just be trying to tell me bits and pieces of his life, or he could have been trying to impress me.

Not that it matters. I definitely won't be writting him back with anything impressive except for the fact I have 4 kids and I've lived(so far) to tell about it. But I can't tell him that I bought a house for tons of $$ because we don't have tons of $$. Because of what he included in his email I'm almost embarrassed to tell him about my life. Because I haven't talked to him in so many years, we're fairly close to being strangers. Yet I want him to know about my life. I want to someday see him again, and have him meet my kids and husband. When it comes down to it, I doubt he really cares how much money I do or don't have, or how big or nice of a house I have. But its the uncertainty. How much do I really want to bare my soul? Do I want to tell him about my hopes of going to college someday? To be quite honest I feel inferior to him. But he's family, and even though I haven't seen him in a long time, I bet if we met up tomorrow, we'd go back in time and fall back into the easy relationship we had.
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There's no real point to my post...sorry. Just had all these things swirling around in my head, that I wanted to get down.